


The Quiet Ones

by Netgirl_y2k



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/F, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-17
Updated: 2013-08-17
Packaged: 2017-12-23 20:11:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/930630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Netgirl_y2k/pseuds/Netgirl_y2k
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Myrcella Hill is her mother's daughter, more or less.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Quiet Ones

i.

Prince Doran granted them sanctuary in Dorne and dispatched them to the Water Gardens.

It had been Ser Jaime's idea. As he choked on black blood he'd gripped Brienne's tunic and managed to say, "Go south, Wench, take the Stark girl south until you run out of south."

When the White Walker ripped the flesh from Ser Jaime's chest, in the instant before Brienne's longsword struck true, that was the moment when Sansa's secret dream of going home, of the Northmen rallying around her as the Stark in Winterfell shrivelled up and died.

South was the only possible direction.

But mayhap Dorne was not as safe as they had hoped because now, stepping carefully around overripe and rotting blood oranges, came the ghost of Cersei Lannister.

Sansa stepped backwards, into Brienne's reassuring shadow.

Then the ghost turned her head too sharply and her carefully arranged gold-spun hair, which had been coiled on top of her head and tumbled down to cover one side of her face, whipped aside to reveal ugly scars and nothing where her ear ought to have been.

This was not the ghost of Cersei: too young, too scarred, and with more sanity in her eyes than there had been in Cersei's when Sansa had last seen the queen regent.

Ser Jaime had been unwilling to pass King's Landing without at least attempting to convince his twin to flee with them, Brienne would not allow Jaime to go alone, and even then Sansa had not felt safe if she was parted from Brienne overlong and had insisted on going too.

Sansa frowned. "Princess Myrcella?"

Myrcella smiled, it showed teeth and made her scars drag horribly. "I am as much a princess as you are, Sansa."

*

After all that time trying to keep ahead of winter and fleeing the unnatural cold that came with the White Walkers, and with the Dornish talking about how this was already the coldest winter since Nymeria's crossing, it came as a surprise when Brienne took ill with heat sickness.

Sansa, too, was confined to her bed. The angry red burns and blisters resulting from exposure to the Dornish sun made it almost too painful to move.

The windows were un-shuttered, and snatches of an argument reached Sansa on the sea breeze. Myrcella and a young man were shouting at one another.

"Prince Trystane," explained Myrcella, later.

The worst of the blisters were across the backs of Sansa's arms and shoulders so she was lying facedown on her pillows, and Myrcella was a blonde presence flickering in and out of the corner of her eye.

Fortunately Myrcella's voice was not at all like Cersei's, and over the years she had picked up a hint of a Dornish accent.

"He is angry that I changed my name. After all, a prince of Dorne cannot wed a bastard."

"You took a bastard name?" Sansa asked, surprised.

"Myrcella Hill, I'm quite possibly pleased to meet you." Sansa felt the mattress dip as Myrcella sat down. "Is this the salve the maester left for your burns?"

Without waiting for a response Myrcella twisted Sansa's hair out of the way and started applying the salve to her burns. It stung; Sansa would have squirmed except she had long practice of not flinching under a Lannister's touch.

After a few moments the salve and Myrcella's touch together became soothing; that was a first.

"It's a flimsy shield," said Myrcella, and it took Sansa a moment to realise she was speaking of taking a bastard name, "but it is the only shield I have."

 

ii.

Prince Trystane appeared to be a sweet tempered boy, he certainly didn't brood on his argument with Myrcella.

Sansa had been allowed to rise, and Myrcella had shown her how to wrap the thin Dornish gowns about herself. She felt exposed and vulnerable in the wispy sandsilks, but they were surprisingly effective at keeping her skin from burning in the sun.

Sansa sat in the shade of an orange tree and watched Myrcella and Trystane play a game in the shallows of a pool. The aim of the game was to crouch motionless until some of the tiny golden fish swam into your cupped hands, if you succeeded in plucking one from the water you won a kiss.

Trystane pressed his mouth against Myrcella's until she turned her unscarred cheek to him and laughed. And when Myrcella caught a fish, after she had returned it to its fellows, she turned her back on Trystane, stooped, and pressed a kiss to Sansa's lips.

Trystane hooted with laughter and Myrcella gave Sansa a sad, secret little smile before she turned back to the prince, giggling devilishly.

*

Myrcella was different after Prince Trystane departed for Sunspear. She was more serious, she laughed less, and she stopped trying quite so hard to draw attention away from the ruined side of her face.

"Trystane is a sweet boy, really," said Myrcella.

"I'm sure he is," said Sansa.

She thought of Robb, of Bran and Tommen, even Sweetrobin and Harry. Sweet boys, all, and all gone now.

"It's just... he thinks I'm still part of his world."

Brienne had recovered from her bout of illness and from their balcony Sansa and Myrcella could see her practicing with her sword, eagerly watched by a crowd of the Water Garden's resident children. Fewer children than before, Myrcella said, even this far south people were worried and wanted their sons and daughters close.

There was no-one for Brienne to spar with so she swung her sword at shadows, she had swapped her woolens and mail for a loose linen tunic and breeches.

"Do you think she's ever killed anyone?" asked Myrcella.

"I know she has," said Sansa.

Brienne was not alone in having taken a life. It might have been Ser Jaime who actually ended Petyr's, one sharp push with his golden hand sending him flying out the moon door, but it had been Sansa's idea, and Sansa who had led Petyr unwitting to his doom.

"I killed someone once," said Myrcella. Sansa would not have asked who, but Myrcella seemed oddly eager to unburden herself. "Ser Balon Swann, the knight my mother sent to bring me home. I lied to him about how I got these," she made an angry gesture at her scarred face, "and sent him off to be slain."

"Why lie?"

"Arianne asked me to. She was like an older sister to me, at least, what I always imagined an older sibling to be like... I knew they could not all be like Joff. I would not have been the one to get her into trouble for anything. And," Myrcella shrugged and looked away, "Darkstar did try to kill me; in my fever I thought I heard my mother's voice, _A Lannister Always Pays Her Debts_ , she said."

"You were very young. Ill and confused, too--"

"Yes," said Myrcella. "And I suppose being slain by Ser Gerold Dayne in single combat is at least a little more dignified than being gored to death by a boar while drunk."

*

This time when Myrcella kissed Sansa she didn't draw back nearly so quickly, she didn't turn away and laugh, and she didn't make any effort to hide her scars.

 

iii.

Brienne especially did not know what to make of Myrcella: was she was the orphaned daughter of the man Brienne had loved, or was she was a bad influence leading Sansa astray?

Sansa thought of all the men who'd tried to take things from her that she had not wanted to give: her maidenhead, her name, her claim to Winterfell. After all that it was nice to be kissed in the dappled sunshine of the Water Gardens by someone who simply wanted to kiss her.

With Myrcella holding her hips and mouthing kisses along Sansa's jaw it was difficult to remember that back in King's Landing the princess had seemed very much a child still, a little girl who played with dolls.

They say that bastards grow up faster than other children, and it was true that the years between Myrcella Hill's five-and-ten and Alayne Stone's nine-and-ten hardly seemed to matter.

And what time had passed had been long enough for them to have been wedded and bedded; the weddings were Sansa's, the beddings Myrcella's.

"Trystane," she said, off Sansa's questioning look, "after the first time he was blooded on the training field. And Elia Sand, before she followed Arianne to King's Landing."

Myrcella rested her palm low on Sansa's belly, and stroked her thumb back and forth. "You haven't--?"

"No." Two weddings, and no bedding, one more marriage and she would equal Margaery Tyrell's record.

"Well," said Myrcella, "things are different away from Dorne, and perhaps it may even help you buy back the North someday."

Sansa turned her face away from the other girl. She didn't know whether this was a conclusion Myrcella had come to herself, but it sounded a little too much like _tears are not a woman's only weapon_ for Sansa's liking.

 

iv.

Princess Arianne returned to Sunspear from King's Landing, and Sansa, Brienne, and Myrcella journeyed along the coastal road to meet with her and Prince Doran.

They hadn't even reached the threefold gate when a messenger in Martell colours intercepted them. Myrcella recognised Arianne's hand: _King Aegon and his men are here. Flee and Hide!_

They took rooms in the shadow town. Sansa wished that they hadn't separated from Brienne, but it was true that together they made too memorable a trio.

Myrcella draped a veil over her scarred face, and Sansa thanked the Old Gods and the New that veils were fashionable amongst the Dornish.

Targaryen men - well, sellswords of the Golden Company with the Targaryen colours tied about their arms - questioned all those staying at the inn.

"Joanna Hill," Myrcella lied about her name. And between her veil and the Dornish lilt to her voice the soldiers didn't question her further; a Dornish bastard fathered by a Westerman was of no interest to them.

"And you?"

"Alayne--" Sansa couldn't bring herself to use the name Petyr had given her, not again. "Alayne Snow."

The man nodded, he didn't ask how a bastard girl from the North had made her way to Dorne. On her back, he doubtless thought, she wouldn't be the only one. With a lascivious sneer he grabbed Sansa's breast and leered between her and Myrcella.

Sansa froze and wished for Brienne, _fiercely._

The sellsword's captain called him off, saying that they had no time for wenching.

*

Afterwards Myrcella ordered them a jug of Dornish strongwine.

"That man--"

"Yes."

"If his captain had not called him away--"

"I would have been there too," said Myrcella, "it need not have been so bad."

But Myrcella gulped half a cup of strongwine all at once, and when she took Sansa's hand she was shaking too.

*

They were sent away to the Tower of Joy for safekeeping.

Sansa felt much safer once she'd been reunited with Brienne, but their distance from the Martells distressed Myrcella; after all, they had been her guardians and protectors for years now.

Perhaps that explained her ill-temper.

Myrcella straddled Sansa's lap in one of the empty bedchambers and said, "Do you think this is where Lyanna Stark died?"

Sansa pushed her away with a snort of disgust, she had been trying so hard not to think about the last daughter of house Stark who had been hidden away here. "What do you know of my Aunt Lyanna?"

"Very little," Myrcella said with a shrug. "My mother hated how much fath-- how much King Robert loved her still, so her name was never spoken. What do you think happened?"

There were two versions of Lady Lyanna's disappearance that could be heard around Winterfell. There was the version that had been told in her lord father's hearing, where Lyanna had been abducted and raped by the Mad King's son, forcing the North into rebellion, and the version where the melancholy and sensitive Prince Rhaegar had been unable to resist the wild beauty of the Lady Lyanna, and she him, and he had spirited her away to be his second wife, like the Targaryens of old.

As a girl, Sansa had far preferred the second version of events, it had sounded like something from a tale or a song. But by now she knew that life was always uglier, bloodier, and more complicated than you wished it to be.

"I think Lyanna was very foolish, as we highborn girls often are. I think the people who welcomed Aegon as King only because he is Rhaegar's son are misremembering Rhaegar. And I think that even if he didn't rape my aunt he still started a war that left the seven kingdoms knee deep in blood."

 

v.

"Aegon styles himself king, and officially Dorne supports him."

"He may call himself a dragon, but he has none. Rumour has it that Daenerys--"

'Oh, rumour has it, rumour has it."

"Aegon can hardly hold onto the Iron Throne as it is, how do you think he'll fare against the White Walkers when they come for him. There are already tales of them south of Riverrun."

"Mayhaps they won't reach Dorne."

"Bet your life on that, would you?"

"And who would go, to search for this Targaryen princess and her possibly apocryphal dragons?"

"I would," said Myrcella.

It wasn't just Sansa who was surprised. The ruling lords and ladies of Dorne, the Sand Snakes, Prince Doran in his rolling chair, and Princess Arianne, sitting on the high seat of Dorne and casting occasional uncertain glances at her father, they all looked shocked and uncertain.

"I would," said Myrcella. "I will. If I fail I'm no more dead than I am if Aegon takes me for execution, or if the Lannisters find me and crown me."

Sansa thought of Cersei clinging to the Iron Throne, she thought of Myrcella shaking like a leaf all the way to the Tower of Joy, and she thought that perhaps it was not only wolves who could be brave.

"I'll go too," said Sansa. She would not have volunteered anyone else, but she was still immensely relieved when Brienne stepped up behind her and laid a hand on her shoulder. "A Stark and a Lannister trying to bring a Targaryen back to Westeros, if nothing else it will tell her that circumstances are indeed dire."

Sansa was a Stark, she could be brave, and she could go south if that's what it took to go north.

 

vi.

As their ship pulled away from Sunspear Myrcella stood in the stern and watched Dorne recede.

Sansa twined her fingers with Myrcella's and squeezed. "I am with you," she said, "it need not be so bad."


End file.
